Fecundate Division

Hello everyone,

I'm going to try and keep this dev blog post short so I can get back to writing. There's only a week left until version 0.26 hits, so there's still plenty to do to have the best release possible.

I was a little tired on Saturday and wanted to take a step back from the more serious end of the male prologue... Long story short, this happened:

So now you can work in the Fecundate Division of Progenerate Technologies GmbH. Right now only the important basic events are in. There are about 6,500 words of them, things like getting caught on birth control, being inseminated, or being given fertility treatments. I know a lot of people have been waiting for this one, so I wanted to make sure to have at least the basics taken care of when putting it into a release. ^-^

Last week I also added in some pregnancy content, just some basic things like coming down with morning sickness, having food cravings, and getting unspeakably horny. Of course, I was also working on the final ending scene with Lily to wrap up the male prologue, and I'll be continuing with that the next couple of days before moving into testing mode.

We've also added in a new accessibility mode for people who use screen readers. Someone from the community was kind enough to let us know about certain areas in the game that gave them trouble while using a screen reader, so we went and addressed those immediate issues. There will probably be some other areas that could use some help as well, but it's a start. Sadly we haven't always done the best job at making things accessible, so it's great to be able to improve the playability in those areas. :D

That's it for now... I'm gonna get back to the AW Word Pit

o7

ThaumX

Writing

Hello everyone, it's time for the regular AW update :D

We've been working on some cool stuff over the last week. In fact, I'm pretty shocked by how much writing I've gotten done. It seems I've started to find my writing groove because I've written about 12,000 words since the last post. I've also gotten some coding and general improvements done, as well as some administrative work for the wiki. All in only six days, five if you subtract the Sunday I took off.

It's too early to officially announce the results of last week's poll, and it's still open for another day if you haven't voted yet. However, the results are pretty overwhelmingly in favor of the Koikatsu option. There was also a solid percentage of patrons voting in this poll, which is great. I've been tossing around the idea of hiring someone specifically to generate body portrait images for us, so we can get those in the game sooner. (If you have any opinions on that, feel free to share them!)

My writing efforts for this week have primarily been dedicated to job events, in particular, events for the Institute Services job. There are now about 10,000 words of events for services job, spread out over 11 events. Several of the events are multi-part or progressive events as well. I decided to focus on a single career so that the events would feel more unified, I'm pretty happy with the results.

Most of the rest of my writing was creating story threads for Lily and Toby. Basically, these characters will talk about their past during dates/hangouts/interactions in a way unique to them. This way these conversations will line up with their backstory and unique relationship with the player character.

This upcoming week I'll be starting the final writing for the male prologue to finish that as well. After that, I'll probably spend some more time focused on sex scenes. 26 is shaping up to be a pretty cool release!

Besty has been working on a new location in Appletree, as well as a job to go along with it. It's looking pretty good so far! Being a stripper should be an interesting career option for sure, especially after we get a decent amount of events and job content set up for it.

In case you're curious, there are only two more jobs planned for the game. These are the job at the farm coop, and the job at Progenerate Technologies. Not all jobs are going to have the same amount of content or potential for advancement. The three Institute jobs, along with the job at Progenerate will likely be the largest of the bunch.

That's it, for now, I'm heading back to the AW Word Pit to get some more writing done!

o7

ThaumX

Hard Poll

Please forgive me for this silly pun. At least I went with a stripper pole instead of another type of pole...

I've been hard at work on version 0.26, and I'm happy to say that with the exception of some extra testing and cleanup, the female start prologue is complete. I'll begin work on wrapping up the male start prologue in the next couple of days. (I'm going to take a brief break to work on some other tasks to change things up.) Thousands of words of new story content along with new writing for the job fair, a new science aptitude challenge, some light sadism, and more.

The Organ Donor setting finally has an ad

Besty has been working hard as well, and he has got the nutrition/fitness system running along with custom tattoos that allow you to upload your own tattoo images in-game. There's also several other minor things he has been working on, with more planned. There will be several cool things ready for 0.26!

The Poll!

One of the things I've been investigating lately is another option for creating character body portraits. The difficulty of getting it right has kept it on the back burner thus far, but I've still been investigating possibilities when I become aware of them. I'm still going to be focusing primarily on written content over the next few months, but I thought I'd see what everyone thought of some new possibilities.

While it would be nice to get some custom art made if we can both find an artist willing to do the work and get together enough money to pay them well... the amount of variables we can reasonably represent in drawn work is low. One of the things I like about AW and several other games is the level of customization you can have over the player and NPC characters. With hand-drawn art, it's going to be very difficult to show that level of customization in the body portrait.

That's also what makes certain options appealing; some options would allow for more details to make it into the body portraits. For those who are newer to following AW, we did experiment for a while with the Dynamic Avatar Drawer. While it did allow for comparatively easy compatibility with game data, the appearance of the avatars was largely subpar.

Some of the most recent options I've explored are established character/body creation tools. Japan has developed some pretty neat tools to build your own waifu, and they have the kind of detail needed to represent a lot of body variables, while still looking pretty nice. It would still take some dedication and some technical work to make these solutions viable, but the results could be well worth the effort.

Options

I'm presenting three options for the poll. Characters created using Koikatsu (A), Honey Select (B), and BodySlide (C) as a generic option. Option (D) will be to wait for hand-drawn body portraits. My personal favorite right now is Koikatsu. I'd like to see what all of you think. Please don't base your decision on the actual body type shown, these are just some samples I threw together.

Koikatsu

This character creator has by far the most customization options. There are also numerous shading, lighting, and line options to further customize the appearance. This is a 3d model projected into a 2d drawing style. It has the advantage of having some extra mods allowing easier export and should be easier to take a layering approach with. The main downside is the anime/drawing style, which some people may not care for.

Honey Select

This character creator has a lot of customization options, though not as many as option A. It's still sufficient for our purposes. This is a rendered 3d style, which has a more realistic appearance. The lighting and skin details in this look rather nice, but it also makes a layered approach nearly impossible (meaning much larger resource size). This creator isn't as easy to export from, but it's still plenty possible. Based on the timing, there may be an improved creator in a new game release in the future.

BodySlide

This is really here for comparison purposes. However, there are a lot of different 3d modeling options to render a female body. If you choose this option, you're basically saying that you like the idea of using a rendered character for the body portrait, but you don't like option A or B. 

That's all for now. If you're a supporter, please be sure to vote!

o7

ThaumX

Downpour

When it rains, it pours.

Actually, this post image is to commemorate the nearly ten inches of rain we've gotten the last 4 days or so. The miracle of the rainy season, though to be honest I really like rainy weather except for the inconvenience factor.

It seems like there's a new time-cock in town, screwing with the game.

For those of you who are new, we started calling bugs that affect the game's time system time cocks. I honestly don't remember why; it was something to do with discord. This one seems to be pretty easy to avoid though, which is good. Basically, using the time stop cheat and going on dates (possibly multiple dates in a single day) can break time in an as-of-yet unknown way. I'd recommend avoiding that cheat--at least on days you have a date--until we get it fixed.

With that out of the way, I thought I'd mention briefly what we'll be working on this month. Basically, I'm going back to focusing more on content. I'll be writing prologue scenes and job events for the most part. Besty's going to be working on fleshing out tattoos and adding a proper tattoo parlor to the game, as well as finishing up the game's nutrition and exercise system so that the player can lose and gain weight.

As a note on that last part, the game's weight system should be fairly forgiving. Descriptions will continue to use the BMI-based scale, so changing a couple pounds up or down in a given week isn't going to do much. It'll take weeks of gaining or losing weight to change your appearance. We'll probably also create a new cheat to totally turn off changes in weight from diet and exercise.

We'll also be adding some semi-permanent NPCs to the Farm Coop, including a few hucows and a bull to make friends with. There will also be some smaller improvements, and if time, more writing for sex scenes. I did realize, too late, that I forgot to search one file of the sex scene system for assumed pronoun gender, mistakes that date back to the writer we tried hiring. I'll get that fixed as well, it basically just involves replacing he with <<he>> and minor changes like that.

I've got a (thankfully) minor cold, a welcome home gift from Guam, the land of plagues. (Having small children doesn't help, either though.) It hasn't been interfering with my work though, and I've been feeling a lot more comfortable with writing lately too. :D Besty has been suffering through a summer that's too cold, apparently, they've been having high temps of only 13C where he's at. Mother Nature doing her thing, I suppose.

That's it for now!

o7

ThaumX

The Creamy Release - Version 0.25 Change Log

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Creamy Release.

I wanted to try and make this a special release, simply because version 0.25 feels like a milestone. A good chunk of our work this month was focused on improving some of the main systems in the game that were rough around the edges. The most prominent of those being the interaction system and the sex scene system. 

The interaction system has a bunch of unique content spaced out between dozens of situational tags and several relationship levels. Unfortunately, a lack of polish in initially meeting NPCs, combined with lacking the planned ways for NPCs to approach you themselves naturally, led to the system seeming to be somewhat incomplete or shallow. So we made NPCs come to start their own conversations with you where they would occur naturally (such as coworkers and classmates). We also improved the opening text and options for sex scenes to make it work smoother.

The sex scene system is still something of a marvel in terms of what it can do, containing more than one 'first-ever' for an adult text game. However, it doesn't really matter if the system can handle orgies or do other fancy things if the basic content and polish aren't there. A lot of the things have been on my to-do list, but I figured they were things that needed to be done sooner rather than later. After all, sex is pretty important for an adult game! To that end I've written thousands upon thousands of words of new content for the system, filling out all the actions that were missing text. I even wrote nearly 3,000 words specifically for PC and NPC orgasms. I also fixed a lot of the minor bugs, parser issues, and not-quite-complete items that were lowering the quality of the scenes. Finally, I improved the action button UI to make choosing your next action faster, while also cutting the between-action loading time in half.

It's also worth noting that we set up a brand new full-featured wiki this month! Check it out here www.aw-wiki.com (we could always use awesome contributors too!)

Of course, we've got an assortment of new things for you too: tattoos, body writing, magazines, fertility seals, abduction by a serial killer, new options/actions in different areas of prostitution, and more. We also have spent more time working on fixes and improvements to try and make this release as stable and playable as possible.

Besty and I both hope you enjoy it!

Known Issues:

We fixed the autosave system (hooray!), but that means that loading an autosave from version 0.24 absolutely isn't going to work.

There is a very strange issue that has seemed to cause certain prologue flags to be flipped when loading an older save using backward compatibility. It doesn't occur all the time, and we haven't been able to reliably isolate the issue enough to fix it. If it does occur upon you loading a save, we've added some code to sleeping overnight that should put the main flags back to the correct place. This issue doesn't affect saves from 0.25

Change Log

Words: 1,895,265 (Only 2.9% are "fuck"!)

Characters: 11,292,539

Lines O' Code: 179,992

[Note] My head is killing me, and thanks to some extra day job work and a sick son, I'm running behind on getting this change log (and release) done. This list of changes may be a little derpy.

• Lot of new writing for the sex scene system.
• Actions all have appropriate text, new writing is more variable-responsive
• Almost 3K words of text for orgasms in different positions/situations/etc.
• After-scene actions now all have text content associated with them.
• Numerous fixes to parser-related issues.
• Many malformatted parser calls have been fixed, particularly in sex scenes
• several parser functions adjusted/improved
• Many of the sillier nouns have had their weights reduced or been removed altogether.
• Some new macros to speed writing certain things.
• Some parser errors caused by UglifyJS fixed
• New and Improved Sex Scene actions.
• The player can now request NPC to cum inside or pull out. 
• The player can now use their own condoms when requesting a condom in sex scenes. (use of sabotaged condoms is still pending because I just forgot about them...)
• Actions to remove a condom, and NPC actions to wear one or remove it have been improved.
• Several minor fixes.
• Bug affecting the ability to change sex position has been fixed.
• General Sex Scene Improvements
• NPCs can now pull out (or try and fail to pull out) when having sex.
• Condom break function improved and now accounts for the bitch-breaker mutation.
• New faster action button menu that requires only 1 click per action.
• The transition time between actions cut down by 50%!
• Several new position diagrams illustrating the current sex position.
• loads of minor fixes.
• Cum now feeds cum or creampie addiction.
• Characters that know about your Vaginal Enzymes mutation won't try to wear a condom.
• New insemination and cum-handling methods in the character Pussy class.
• Improved semen handling in the fertility system.
• Two new images for the paper doll illustration (panties)
• Makeup can now be done at salons, allowing you to learn new styles.
• The player can now be scarred (think like tattoos, scarification) though this system is not 100% tested.
• Several fixes to hangouts and dates
• The Progenerate Fertility Seal is now available
• Purchase from the doctor in the medical district.
• Allows you to view additional fertility information with higher accuracy.
• Several new prostitution scenes.
• includes body writing, bareback, and anal sex scenes.
• Body Writing is now a thing, and you can have your body written on with a marker.
• Tattoos are now a thing, and you can get all sorts of fun tattoos.
• Tattoos will be easy to mod, possibly with custom tattoo system similar to the custom clothes tool in the game. (you can already get custom writing though.)
• Tattoos can be obtained at the Penetrated Piercing Parlor in the mall until a suitable tattoo parlor is opened.
• Tattoos can be removed in the medical district if you want.
• View details about your tattoos in the grooming menu.
• You can see an overview of your tattoos in the character menu.
• NPCs in interactions can now comment on tattoos and body writing.
• Tattoos affect attractiveness, based on NPC.
• General improvements to the medical district doctor's office.
• Character menu status page has been improved with some additional information and reorganization.
• Fertility information now split between the basics and having advanced fertility information (currently only from the fertility seal tattoo).
• You can now see your current "effective" willpower (0 to 20 scale).
• Four new magazines with interesting descriptions, text, and effects are available for purchase from Cum & Go.
• Cum & Go now has a new clerk named Daisy Blackwell who is happy to see you.
• Some new minor items including some beers and snacks purchasable at cum and go.
• Interaction System improvements.
• NPCs will now come up to talk to you (coworkers and classmates).
• Improved options for starting a conversation with a stranger.
• Conversations more accessible in general.
• The autosave system is now fixed.
• Besty says "It must work now!"
• Player now properly resumes play after work from the correct position on the map.
• Travel time to work is now accurate for the job location (jobs inside Appletree will be quicker to get to).
• New Serial killer Event!
• Serial killer portrait by me, he's pretty damned creepy.
• The event includes abduction, potential escape, and other twists and turns I don't know about because Besty wrote it ;)
• General proofreading and typo fixes. (Big thanks to everyone Besty got to proofread for him!)
• Tweak to the difficulty of gaining skill points, it is now somewhat easier for a skill to level up.
• Fix to a bug with schools that caused skill gain from taking lessons to be significantly less (rather than more) common.
• Fix to Lily's starting relationship values.
• WTF accomplished (Besty)
• Fix to a few location images that were too short.
• Lots of general fixes to minor or issues and typos.
• Several transformative fixes
• fixes to some conversation tags
• fixes to the body condition system
• new "super.die" function related to omni items that just won't die.
• SSTD fix
• fix to appletree shuttle busses
• icon fixes.
• fixes for jonesing and addiction
• fixes to minor items found in the residential area.
• removal of old placeholder buttons and obsolete buttons.
• maid sex fix
• etc. etc. etc.
• New/Improved maid sex event
• [Reserved for that thing I forgot]